Vassalboro part one
Until Jan. 30, 1792, Vassalboro, on the east side of the Kennebec River, included Sidney, on the west side. A partial summary of Sidney’s early agricultural history was the topic of last week’s article in this subseries; this week’s article will concentrate on the area that remained Vassalboro.
Alma Pierce Robbins, in her 1971 history of Vassalboro’s first two centuries, offered an overview of the first settlers in the town, who were perforce at least part-time farmers if they wanted to feed their livestock and themselves.
The area was surveyed and lots laid out in 1761 by Nathan Winslow, she wrote. Some families were already living there, with land titles so uncertain they created a century of legal disputes.
Some pieces of land were claimed by more than one family. The Kennebec Proprietors frequently went to law to try to compel squatters — settlers with no or dubious titles — to buy their lots from them, and, Robbins said, succeeded “in a few cases.” A boundary line the surveyor described as running “[f]rom a ‘white oak stake to a stone’ was highly vulnerable to time and weather.”
Robbins quoted Rev. Jacob Bailey’s observations on the hardships of life in Vassalboro in the 1760s and 1770s, describing children going barefoot all winter, beds that were mere heaps of straw and families living for months on “scarce anything…except potatoes roasted in the ashes.”
Another quotation Robbins included was from a 1766 petition to the Kennebec Company, asking for a grist mill to be built on Seven Mile Brook. More than two dozen petitioners wrote that “The most of us are able to raise a great part of our bread and expect soon to raise all,” but carrying the grain to the closest mill at Cobbosseecontee to be ground was expensive.
(Seven Mile Brook is the stream that runs from Webber Pond to the Kennebec River. Cobbosseecontee survives as the name of a large lake west of Augusta and Gardiner, across the Kennebec and about 25 miles from Vassalboro [by modern transportation, not on foot or horseback or by ox-cart along rough trails].)
There were “very soon” both grist mills and sawmills on the stream, Robbins added.
She named four families who moved to Vassalboro in the 1760s: Getchells (also Gatchell, Gatchel, and Getchel; once Robbins called the same man Getchell and Getchel, in the same sentence), Lovejoys, Farwells and Browns. Robbins’ details about the families mention generous land grants with requirements to build a house and clear a specified number of acres.
Vassalboro, still including Sidney, was incorporated April 26, 1771. Another evidence of the importance of farming comes from Robbins’ report on Vassalboro’s first town meeting, held May 22, 1771.
Vassalboro voters elected among their town officials four men (including Nehemiah Getchell) as fence and fieldviewers, and four other men as hogreeves.
(Fence-viewers were responsible for inspecting new fences; making sure fences were not illegally moved or changed and were kept in repair; and settling disputes between abutters. Your writer found no on-line definition of fieldviewer; another article suggested their duties might include supervising maintenance of common fields, owned by the town as an entity.
Hogreeves in action.
(Hogreeves, or hog constables, Wikipedia says, were responsible for rounding up and impounding stray swine. Swine could do considerable damage by rooting in people’s fields and gardens; the reeve’s job included assessing damages.)
Robbins said these Vassalboro voters also voted that “Swine shall run at large without ringing, with a yoke on their necks according to the law.”
(Wikipedia makes this vote sound unusual. Not only were swine running at large potentially destructive, but Wikipedia says laws required owners to provide their swine with nose rings, as well as yokes. If a hogreeve caught an unringed animal, he was supposed to ring it, and could charge the owner for the service.
(The first hogreeves were “stationed at the doors of cathedrals [in Anglo-Saxon England] during services to prevent swine from entering the church,” Wikipedia says)
At a Sept. 9, 1771, meeting, an article asked what Vassalboro voters would do about pounds, the town-owned structures where stray animals were held until their owners claimed them.
They approved building two, by June 5, one on David Spencer’s land and another on James Burns’ land, with “the inhabitants [to] meet on the first Monday of December next to build same.” (Robbins did not explain the three-month delay; perhaps to collect stones or other building materials?) Anyone who did not come to help build would be fined two shillings and eight pence.
Robbins found another indicator of the importance of agriculture in Vassalboro: a September 1783 list showed about 420 inhabitants, almost evenly divided between males and females; 30 dwelling houses; and 34 barns.
By 1820, Robbins wrote, Vassalboro farms were producing “wheat, corn, hemp, flax and silk.” (See box.) A bit later, potatoes and squash became important crops, and especially apples.
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Samuel Boardman, in his chapter on agriculture in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, credits the Vaughn farms in Hallowell for the introduction and spread of apple-growing in the central Kennebec Valley, beginning in 1797. Brothers Benjamin and Charles Vaghn shared their imported varieties with people in other towns, including Vassalboro.
In addition, Boardman wrote, settlers brought apple seeds with them, or sent back to their former home colony for them once they had a space for an orchard.
The Starkey apple is a variety that originated in Vassalboro. On-line sites about apples call it a “chance seedling” discovered by Moses Starkey in the early 1800s, on his farm on what is now Oak Grove Road.
The Starkey had almost died out until the late 1900s, when John Bunker, Palermo’s famous apple expert, “tracked it down,” one website says. Sources unanimously praise its taste, which this site describes as a “rich, complex flavor that is both sweet and tart, with notes of spice and honey.”
Another website calls it “one of the perfect dessert apples.” Robbins recommended molasses cookies as an accompaniment.
By 1843, Vassalboro native Daniel Taber (1797 – 1860) grew 170 varieties of apples in his Vassalboro nursery, Robbins said.
Boardman mentioned an 1876 survey that found six apple nurseries in Kennebec County, with a total of 151,000 trees. The list of owners included Charles I. Perley, in Vassalboro, with 20,000 trees, and J. A. Varney and Son in North Vassalboro, with 40,000 trees.
As Kingsbury’s history went to press in 1892, Boardman’s list of almost two dozen owners of large orchards in the county included J. H. Smiley and the Cook brothers in Vassalboro and George H. Pope in East Vassalboro. The Cook brothers, he wrote, had 3,000 trees.
As in Sidney, access to railroad transportation from the 1850s on was a boon to Vassalboro orchardists, and other farmers. Robbins included an undated list of Vassalboro shipments to Portland and Boston: “lumber, apples, hay, potatoes, milk and mail.”
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Boardman and Robbins both touched briefly on 19th-century agricultural improvements, mostly the replacement of human power by machines, usually horse-drawn.
Humans’ hand tools were also improved, Boardman said. He described pre-1840 “forks, scythes, sickles, axes and hoes” as “heavy, bungling affairs” made by the local blacksmith of iron or steel. In 1841, he wrote, a Hallowell resident named Jacob Pope began making Maine’s “first polished spring steel hay and manure forks,” and improvements to other tools quickly followed.
One invention Boardman and Robbins highlighted was the threshing machine, a replacement for the hand flail.
(Threshing is separating grains like wheat, oats and barley from their husks. Wikipedia says, “An agricultural flail consists of a short thick club called a ‘swingle’ or ‘swipple’ attached by a rope or leather thong to a wooden handle in such a manner as to enable it to swing freely. The handle…is held and swung, causing the swingle to strike a pile of grain loosening the husks.”)
Robbins wrote that around 1836, two Winthrop, Maine, brothers named Pitt invented a threshing machine, which came into use in the 1850s. Boardman named other Maine threshing-machine inventors, from the 1820s on, and mentioned lawsuits over whose patent infringed whose.
Entrepreneurs would buy a machine, hire a crew and go from farm to farm threshing grain. Some farmers accepted both machine and workers; others had every male over 12 years old in the family work for the machine.
Also around 1836, Robbins said, there were allegations that iron plows were a threat: they made weeds grow and poisoned the soil. Nonetheless, she wrote, in Vassalboro “iron plows sold very well according to the newspapers.”
The horse rake and the mowing machine, two horse-drawn machines replacing hand rakes and scythes and saving an immense amount of labor, appeared on Vassalboro farms in the 1840s, Robbins wrote. Hanson G. Barrows, of Vassalboro, invented one type of mowing machine.
Barrows (1831-1916) was the oldest of three sons and two daughters of Caleb Barrows and his wife (whose name your writer has not found). Henry Kingsbury, in his chapter on Vassalboro in his Kennebec County history, said the family moved to Vassalboro from Camden in 1830.
They settled on a farm called Twin Oaks, on Barrows Road. After Caleb’s death, Hanson inherited it and spent the rest of his life there. He and his wife, Julia E. (Wood) Barrows (1854-1942), are buried in Vassalboro’s Union cemetery.
(Barrows Road ran west from Webber Pond Road to the section of Old Route 201 named Holman Day Road. On May 13, 2010, the Vassalboro select board ordered the road discontinued, without retaining a public right-of-way. Voters at the June 7, 2010, town meeting ratified the decision.)
Sericulture
Sericulture, or silk farming, was encouraged by the Maine State government beginning in the 1830s, according to on-line information. It was mostly a home occupation, carried on in attics and barns.
Since sericulture required growing mulberry trees to feed the silkworms, and mulberry trees did not thrive in the Maine climate, this unusual form of farming pretty much disappeared by the 1850s.
There was a resurgence in 1874, with the founding of the Haskell Silk Company in Westbrook. By then, providing and using silk was a mechanized industry. One source says by the late 1800s, Haskell (and other US manufacturers) used mostly imported silk.
The Maine History Journal, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2008) has an article by Jacqueline Field titled From Agriculture to Industry: Silk Production and Manufacture in Maine 1800-1930.
Field pointed out that from the 1830s on, Maine agriculture declined as soil wore out and as farmers’ sons – and daughters – saw new choices in factories and urban centers and in the westward movement. She wrote:
“Sericulture seemed to offer farmers some sort of partial solution: mulberry plants provided a new crop; silkworm raising offered wives and daughters a new cash-generating household activity; sericulture seemed to promise a better return than other seasonal work; and the seasonal nature of sericulture made it a good fit with traditional agricultural patterns.”
Field described the process of raising silkworms in a home, work done mostly by women and older children. After the worms hatched from tiny eggs, they had to be fed mulberry leaves continuously for 40 days, she wrote, until they were ready to build their silk cocoons; and the trays in which they lived had to be kept clean.
The worms’ keepers needed to provide “bushy arcades of twigs or straw” to support the cocoons. In the two weeks before the moths hatched, they had to rescue a few cocoons for eggs for the next year and kill the rest “by stifling them with heat” so the silk would be available.
Neither her article nor any other source your writer found confirmed Alma Pierce Robbins’ implication that sericulture was practiced in Vassalboro.
Main sources
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771-1971 n.d. (1971)
Websites, miscellaneous.
To our neighbors:
